Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 205 for the week August 1st - August 7th, 2010.

In This Issue

Maverick Alpha-3 Released

Desktop Testing Team

Request For Candidates: Application Review Board

Making room in the sound indicator

Interview with Isabell Long

Mark Shuttleworth apologises for alleged sexist comment

Xubuntu Maverick Meerkat Artwork:

Ubuntu Stats

Free Books For Approved LoCo Teams

Ubuntu Global Jam: We Need Your Events!

Global Jam Nicaragua

Thanks Ubuntu-fr!‎

Contribute to Ubuntu in your own language

Bangladesh LoCo team rockin’ it at Bontu Mintur Adda

Launchpad News

Healing Old Wounds

The increased cloud focus in Ubuntu Server

The Hebrew translation team needs your help

Alpha 3 ISO Tracker New Features

Ubuntu Global Jam… slowly getting there

Introducing new Ubuntista (and Ubuntu Trap author) Philip Kneitinger

Interviewed by SearchEnterpriseLinux.com

Integrating Zeitgeist into GNOME (and some GAJ stuff)

Multilingual Ubuntu Planet?‎

Ubuntu Stack Exchange opened for public beta

Celebrating the Big 3-0

In The Press

In The Blogosphere

Linaro Alpha-3 Released

5 Linux powered e-book readers

MeeGo Conference 2010: call for participation

Featured Podcasts

Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings

Upcoming Meetings and Events

And much much more!

General Community News

Maverick Alpha-3 Released

Welcome to Maverick Meerkat Alpha 3, which will in time become Ubuntu 10.10. Pre-releases of Maverick are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 3 is the third in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Maverick development cycle. The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Maverick. You can download it here:

Desktop Testing Team

Ara Pulido posts about the formation of a new Ubuntu Project and team - The Ubuntu Desktop Testing Team. Below is some of the information she posted on her blog.

Today, one day after reaching the third Maverick milestone, Alpha 3, I am happy to announce the birth of a new testing project and team in Ubuntu: the Desktop Testing Team.

Every time we release a new Ubuntu milestone, testers are encouraged to install the new milestone and play around with it, filing bugs as they go. We want to go a bit further and use a more methodological approach for those people that love testing and want to help improving Ubuntu that way.

For every milestone of the development release of Ubuntu, we will be providing a series of testcases for you to run in that milestone. As soon as the milestone is officially released, you will be able to complete the tests in the following two weeks (although we encourage you to run them as soon as possible, to allow enough time for developers to fix the bugs).

To find out how this will work, when it starts, and how you can participate go to:

Request For Candidates: Application Review Board

Jono Bacon sends out the call for to find members who would be interested in joining the Application review board. Below are excerpts from his blog post.

Since UDS I have been working on a proposed process (which you can read here) and first engaged in a series of discussions with some community members and then proposed the process to the Ubuntu Technical Board (Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson, Kees Cook, Mark Shuttleworth, and Martin Pitt); our governance body that discusses and evaluates technical policy in the Ubuntu project. I am pleased to report that after a series of modifications and clarifications, the Ubuntu Technical Board have approved the process.

It is important to stress, and I know the Technical Board would like to ensure this is clearly communicated too, that this process is very much a first cut. While a mature and well-discussed process, we fully expect it to refine and change, and at the next Ubuntu Developer Summit we plan on reviewing the process and improving how it works.

With the process approved, the goal now is to find members to join the new Application Review Board. We are going to be looking for 5 – 7 members who exhibit the following skills:

Strong technical experience.

Strong experience of the Ubuntu platform and the desktop.

Knowledge of packaging to effectively assess other people’s packaging work for quality.

Enough free time to commit to reviewing the applications and providing timely feedback.

As a bonus:

You would be a core-dev or MOTU.

A knowledge of programming, so as to perform a code review.

Anyone and everyone who satisfies the above criteria is welcome to apply. There are no specific requirements for location; you can be based anywhere in the world.

If you are interested in applying, head to this page and follow the instructions. The Ubuntu Technical Board will ultimately assess the applications and decide who the final board will be. For full details of the expectations of a position on the board, read the codified charter.

The deadline for applications is 31st August 2010.

For more information on the Application Review Board, The Process, and the history behind it go to:

Making room in the sound indicator

Mark Shuttleworth discusses the new Ayatana indicator for sound in this blog post. Mark aslo includes screen shots and details and desciptions about each the screen shots.

In Maverick we’re adding the new Ayatana indicator for sound, Conor Curran’s very classy implementation of MPT’s very classy spec. It’s a Category Indicator, like the messaging menu, so it allows apps to embed themselves into it in a standard and appropriate way. You can have multiple players represented there, and control them directly from the menu, without needing a custom AppIndicator or windows open for the player(s). The integration with Rhythmbox and, via the MPRIS dbus API, several other players is coming along steadily.

One issue I’ve noticed is that the layout of the track and album art means we are almost always ellipsizing some of the track / album /artist data. I wondered whether it wouldn’t be reasonable to lay the metadata over the album art, if one used a drop shadow to ensure a more readable text:

Interview with Isabell Long

Penelope Stowe interviews Ubuntu Women member Isabell Long for Full Circle Magazine.

Isabell is a 16 year student who lives in the UK. Isabell notes she has an extensive interest in technology and open-source software. She is also a community coordinator for the freenode IRC network and a proud official Ubuntu community member, amongst other things.

In this interview Isabell takes a moment to answer the follow questions and more.

How did you get involved in Ubuntu?

What do you do with Ubuntu?

What would you like to to that you’re not already doing?

I know you’re still a student; has working with Ubuntu helped this at all?

Mark Shuttleworth apologises for alleged sexist comment

Below are excerpts from the OMG!Ubuntu! post on Mark Shuttleworth's apology.

Mark Shuttleworth has apologised “unreservedly to all offended” for his “poor choice of language” during LinuxCon 2009 during which a comment made by the Ubuntu founder was deemed to be sexist by many members of the Linux community

The redress, given in the comment section of his blog, states: - “I apologize unreservedly to all offended by my poor choice of language on that or other occasion.”

The apology is particularly welcome in light of a previous remark in which Mark is alleged to have remarkedthat he had no intention of doing so.

Xubuntu Maverick Meerkat Artwork:

Who: Anyone is elgible to submit their artwork for inclusion in Xubuntu. Hopefully, this will give a few people of the many who do outstanding art a chance to have that art viewed by possible millions worldwide. This must be your own artwork, free for sharing. Licensed under the GPL is fine.

What: Xubuntu has need of several pieces of original artwork. The Wallpaper is the desktop background. It is very important, and needs to be displayed in seveal sizes, from 800x600 up to and including 1920x1440.

When: All items to be considered for Xubuntu should be submitted by 2010-08-19. This gives the developers time to approve the final artwork and add it to Maverick in time for Beta testing.

Why: Xubuntu is looking for a few good artwork pieces. These should be in a shade of blue or overall blue similar to what is used in the banner at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu . Shade variations are allowed. This is an open call for artwork to be used by Xubuntu developers in the next release, currently called Xubuntu Maverick Meerkat, to be released as Xubuntu 10.10.

To find out more about how you can submit your artwork for Xubuntu go to:

Ubuntu Brainstorm is a community site geared toward letting you add your ideas for Ubuntu. You can submit your own idea, or vote for or against another idea. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

LoCo News

Free Books For Approved LoCo Teams

Jono Bacon posts about how LoCo Teams can get a copy of the Official Ubuntu Book - Edition 5.

Once again we have some wonderful free books to give away from Prentice Hall, the rather spanky-awesome publishers of The Official Ubuntu Book by Mako, Matthew Helmke and Corey Burger, and the brand new Official Ubuntu Server Book by our friend and yours, Kyle Rankin and Mako. These books were commissioned by Debra Williams-Cauley who has been awesome getting them on the shelves, and her sidekick is one Heather Fox who I have been chatting with recently to see if we can score some free copies for our rather fantastic Ubuntu LoCo Teams. Fortunately, Heather has been able to make the magic happen.

Prentice Hall are happy to send each and every approved LoCo team one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Book and one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Server book. To be entirely clear: this is one copy of each book per team. This will be a great addition to each team’s library of Ubuntu books!

To find out how your approved to LoCo Teams can get their copies of the these books and what restrictions apply go to:

Ubuntu Global Jam: We Need Your Events!

Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 27th – 29th August 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam!

In the last few cycles we have organized and run an event called the Ubuntu Global Jam. The idea was simple: encourage our awesome global Ubuntu community to get together in the same room to work on bugs, translations, documentation, testing and more. And they did, all over the world, as can be seen here.

One thing that I am keen that everyone remembers: you don’t have to be an official developer, packager or programmer to take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. Also, lets not forget that Ubuntu Global Jam events are a fantastic place to learn and improve your skills: you can sit next to someone who can show you how to do something or explain something in more detail.

Global Jam Nicaragua

The Ubuntu Nicaragucan Team will gather at Tedolinda House Hotel on Sunday, August 29th to run a Sprint Traslation as part of the Ubuntu Global Jam. Thanks to Guegue Education for Their Letting us use mobile laboratory to run this event.

Thanks Ubuntu-fr!‎

Just wanted to share how thankful I am to Ubuntu-fr for the huge amount of stickers i just received from them.

Not too long ago I asked in the #ubuntu-locoteams channel from some promoting materials for August Penguin, a big event coming on this Friday (6/8). actually this is the biggest FLOSS event in Israel that happens once a year.

This year we're going to have a booth presenting Ubuntu, which makes me fully proud. since it's FLOSS there's nothing much we can tell the people that they don't already know – so we're spreading items to make Ubuntu more popular over Israel.

So when YoBoY (in the name of Ubuntu-fr) managed to send me stickers I was extremely happy – so thanks!

Bangladesh LoCo team rockin’ it at Bontu Mintur Adda

So a couple of weeks ago I got an email from a member of the Ubuntu Manual Bengali translation team, and Bangladesh LoCo team, Shazedur Rahim Joardar. He shared with me some photos of an event they held recently at Dhaka University in Bangladesh. Called Bontu Mintur Adda, which means “Ubuntu Linux Mint Event,” the LoCo team presented open source to a number of local companies, students and government representatives with what appears to be great success.

I’ve heard a lot recently about open source success in Asia and the Middle East – in my Ubuntu membership meeting there was a chap from China who was scheduled after me, apparently he had managed to convert a heap of Chinese government agencies to Ubuntu – something that we never hear of LoCo teams doing in the West. Safe to say he was awarded membership!

Shazedur Rahim Joardar told me that “one of our large company named JALALAHMED SPINNING MILLS is now running under Lucid Lynx” thanks to this event they organized, and he’s consulting to help them set everything up.

Launchpad’s Build Farm Improvements

Julian Edwards, posts the following to the Launchpad Blog:

Very recently we saw the beta release of a new feature on Launchpad: building packages from recipes. Recipes bring Bazaar branches for the upstream source code and a packaging branch together to generate a Debian source package. We informally referred to this internally as “the Wellington project” because we first embarked on this long road of development back in November 2009 with a coding sprint in Wellington, New Zealand.

Additonal information about this new feature includes:

So, why do we need to use the build farm for this?

Why can’t the build farm do this already?

What had to change?

So, will I see anything different? For more information go and to read the post in full go to:

The Planet

Mark Shuttleworth: Healing Old Wounds

When one cares deeply about something, criticism hurts so much more. And the free software world is loaded with caring, which is why our differences can so easily become vitriolic.

Mark concludes with, We should start every discussion in free software with a mutual reminder of the fact that we have far more in common than we have differences, that individual successes enrich all of us far more in our open commons-based economy than they would in a traditional proprietary one, that it’s better for us to find a way to encourage others to continue to participate even if they aren’t necessarily chasing exactly the same bugs that we are, than to chastise them for thinking differently.

Thierry Carrez: The increased cloud focus in Ubuntu Server

Thierry points out that there's been an ever increasing focus on could computing in the last Ubuntu Server development cycles, with even the Server Track renamed to the "Cloud and Server" track. He continues to discuss the nature of cloud computing and the role of Ubuntu Server as the cloud as well as Ubuntu Server in the cloud, and it's relationship with traditional servers.

David Planella: The Hebrew translation team needs your help

After running the Ubuntu Translation Teams Healthcheck I took it to heart to help translation teams in the areas they asked for assistance in the survey. The Ubuntu Hebrew translation team pointed out that they don't get much feedback on their work and that they feedback from Hebrew users would be greatly appreciated. The link below contains further information on how you can contribute by either the forums or Launchpad.

Ara Pulido: Alpha 3 ISO Tracker New Features

Ara, the Ubuntu QA superstar points out new features that's available in the Ubuntu QA ISO testing site. Coverage report is now back, including optional test cases. Testers can now also indicate that they have started testing on a disc, saving some possible duplication effort. There is also a new filter for spins that haven't been tested completely and you can also delete your own results if necessary. If all of this still hasn't impressed you, it also has an improved administrator interface that improves the workflow for adding new products.

Daniel Holbach's: Ubuntu Global Jam… slowly getting there

Daniel points out that there are already 4 Ubuntu Global Jam events registered. He also points out that putting work into Operation Cleansweap would be a great way to get involved: "While there’s numerous activities you can dive into on a Jam event, I’d love to see a lot of work being put into Operation Cleansweep. If dealing with patches is nothing new to you, you’d do Ubuntu and the broader open source community a huge favour." Operation Cleansweep stats are also available in his entry.

Matthew Helmke: Interviewed by SearchEnterpriseLinux.com

Matthew Helmke shares his interview with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com for a feature on their website discussing the new fifth edition of The Official Ubuntu Book.

Matthew Answers questions like:

Did you ever think that the OS would gain standing in business? Are the reasons desktop users like Ubuntu similar in the IT admin world?

The book is in its fifth edition now, and is covering the latest release in Ubuntu 10.04. You’ve mentioned that with updating comes a refresh of related projects and community initiatives. What are some specific areas that are new and exciting in the latest edition?

Ddorda: multilingual ubuntu planet?‎

In this post the question "How about having the Planet be multilingual in its main feed and have specific language feeds and pages?" is posed.

Ddorda notes, After reading the logs came into my head a great idea! how about having the Planet to be multilingual in its main feed, but to have specific language feeds and pages. When you'll enter the planet.ubuntu.com page (and why isn't it .org?!) you'll see posts in many languages, but under the menu, I'd suggest in the left side you'll be able to find list of languages code names. so if i want to follow all posts in English, Hebrew and Italian, I'll register the feed/en, feed/he and feed/it. if I'll want just to see how big our community is, i'll be able just to see all the languages posts of today and to be amazed to the fact that there is a live community speaking …. Esperanto (or any other language such as Binary).

To read the logs that sparked this idea and to get more information go to:

Dustin Kirkland: Celebrating the Big 3-0

Dustin Kirkland (a Core Developer on the Ubuntu Server team, and founder of DivItUp.com and LinuxSearch.org) blogs about a significant milestone: the Byobu 3.0 release. See this post for updates about how the new version installs and runs. This version has been added to the backports PPA and pushed to Maverick. For more information on the Byobu project visit https://launchpad.net/byobu

In The Press

Courage, Class, and Canonical

Bryan Proffitt talks about some sage advice he got from Dr. Phill McGraw that he then applied to the events stemming from Greg DeKoenigsberg's rant against Canonical and later apology.

Proffitt states, I believe the same holds true in the public world too. As a reporter, it's all too easy to get wrapped up in the start of a conflict, and then move on to the Next Thing without following how the Last Thing got resolved. It's a disservice to the reader, and it doesn't help anyone.

Which is why I think it's important you take the time to read Greg DeKoenigsberg's blog entry "Old Wounds," which he posted yesterday in response to Thursday's rant against Canonical for their low ranking on number of commits to GNOME, based on a recent census study.

To read Proffitt's full post on this story and to get more information go to:

In The Blogosphere

Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

Michael Larabel reports on testing he did comparing Ubuntu 10.04 with Windows 7. A Lenovo ThinkPad notebook, was used to compare the performance of Windows 7 Professional x64 to that of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (x86_64).

To find out the results of this testing and to read the article in full go to:

Does Ubuntu Contribute its Share to Free Software Projects?

Bruce Byfield discusses the responses to the information on how much different distributions contribute back to Gnome. He frames it as a discussion of how the larger community sees Ubuntu. He sees it as a differing of philosophy that may have to do with the increased commercialism of free/open source software. Ubuntu pushes on with changes whether or not they are accepted by upstreams, such as Gnome, while other projects may choose to use a slightly slower pace of change to keep from moving too far past their upstreams.

The State of Ubuntu Studio 2010

This post is from the blog 'Confessions of a Ubuntu Studio Developer' by Scott Lavender, currently the project lead for Ubuntu Studio. In this post, Scott gives us the facts on where the Ubuntu Studio project is right now, and where it is heading, and how the community can get involved to help the project maintain momentum. For those of us who take advantage of the Ubuntu Studio packages and development, this is a must-read, 'call to action'.

In Other News

Linaro Alpha-3 Released

Check out this post from Jamie Bennett about the new Linaro Alpha-3 release. Highlights are: "A small Linaro headless image with basic OMAP3 beagle board support. A new software archive rebuild with GCC 4.4.4, CodeSourcery enhancements and ARM-related improvements. Support for opengl ES development through MESA. GPS support via gypsy and geoclue. Netbook user interface capabilities with the latest EFL software stack." More Information on this development release can be found at http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Alpha3 .

5 Linux powered e-book readers

MeeGo Conference 2010: call for participation

The first MeeGo Conference will be held in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on November 15-17. What is the MeeGo Conference? see - http://conference2010.meego.com/ . Registraion is free, volunteers are needed. The call for session proposals is open until August 23rd. Proposals about hardware support, platform development, application development, MeeGo project process and progress, and any other MeeGo related topics are welcome.

Glossary of Terms

Ubuntu - Get Involved

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It's your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate